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For this installment of “Top of the heap,” we spoke to Helen Keane, senior lecturer in sociology and gender studies at the Australian National University, whorecommended a number of books and articles about addiction, drugs and alcohol.

Helen Keane

As a sociologist in the business of producing knowledge about addiction and drug and alcohol use, I like to read …

When Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. delivered his introductory lecture on anatomy and physiology to students at the Massachusetts Medical Collegein the fall of 1847, he noted that for the patient, thanks to ether, “the fierce extremity of suffering has …

The so-called moral economy of the poor has been defined as the coming together of “a consistent traditional view of the social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community” (Thompson 1971: 79).

This particular angle on the construct of the moral economy, deriving primarily from historical, sociological, and anthropological research among “pre-industrialized” and …

Reflex. The images themselves seem to come reflexively. The clinician’s percussion hammer bouncing off of the knee. A startled infant. I hadn’t thought much about the idea of the reflex. At least not since the fifth grade, when I had unsuccessfully tried to condition four white laboratory mice to respond either to the sound of a bell or a flashing …

In his sprawling and widely lauded novel Infinite Jest, the late David Foster Wallace offers a riveting portrait of modern addiction. Scenes of the banality of Twelve-Step programs drew on Wallace’s own experiences in …

The Clinic and Elsewhere is an extremely well-crafted account of the methodological, conceptual and narrative problems of knowledge and life of the afterlife of drug therapy. Todd Meyers gives expressive form to the attempt to cure, to …